1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to an automatic dialing machine adapted to a facsimile machine having a telephone function.
2. Background Art
When a conventional facsimile machine having a telephone function is used as a telephone, first a telephone receiver has to be picked up or a certain key of the facsimile machine (a hook key, for example) has to be pressed to connect itself to a telephone line and then other particular keys of the facsimile machine have to be pressed to input the telephone number in order to instruct the telephone number to an exchange. After that, a network control unit (called "NCU" hereinafter) is operated and the telephone number appears on an indicating device of the facsimile machine.
Meanwhile, telephone services play important and complicated role in today's society and the telephone number tends to have more digits than before. When such a long telephone number is input into the conventional facsimile machine, the telephone number "overflows" from the number indicator of the facsimile machine. This is called digit overflow. Also, it is troublesome to input a long number by a ten-key set of the facsimile machine and a dialing error easily occurs.
Thereupon, developed was an automatic dialing machine which possesses a reduced coded dialing system. In this type of automatic dialing machine, a reduced coded number, which corresponds to a real telephone number, is registered beforehand and an operator just inputs the reduced coded number using a ten-key set or a so-called one-touch key, instead of dialing or pressing all the numerals of the real telephone number.
In summary, the conventional dialing machines are generally categorized into three types: real telephone number input type; one-touch speed dial type; and two-touch speed dial type or two-digit speed dial type. Each numeral of the telephone number has to be pressed by the operator with the ten-key set in the first type. A one-touch speed dial key corresponding to one coded number is pressed to start dialing in the second type. The reduced coded numbers are input by the ten-key set after the facsimile machine is switched to a two-touch speed dial mode to make a call in the third type. When the operator uses the one-touch or two-touch speed dial type, a real telephone number which may have a large number of digits has to be stored in a memory of the facsimile machine before enjoying such functions. However, the memory of the conventional facsimile machine only possesses a limited capacity so that a lot of long telephone numbers cannot be stored. In other words, a large capacity of memory is required.
Furthermore, the conventional automatic dialing machine has a drawback that the telephone number indicator has only limited space to display the number and therefore it cannot display a long telephone number. When such a long number is input, all the digits of the telephone number are not displayed, i.e., the digit overflow occurs.